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Trip Start Jan 17, 2008
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Trip End Jun 30, 2009


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Flag of Argentina  , Central Argentina,
Saturday, December 6, 2008

Cordoba is a city with a large student population, and it was approiately the town where we had chosen to study Spanish for a second week. We had a couple of schools to chose from, one big with lots of facilties but bigger classes, the other smaller, with no facilties but it would be just the 2 of studying. We opted for the latter, as we thought it would benefit us more to have a greater amount of attention from the teacher. Our teacher was a lady called Soledad, she was friendly and knew her stuff. Due to that week having a bank holiday, our 20 hours of classes were crammed into 4 day, so we had 5 hours of lessons per day, which enabled to make a good amount of progress over the week. As it was only the 2 of us in one class, we had plenty of opportunity to speak and to know where we needed to improve. 
The hostel that we stayed in was the Palenque Hostel, we have to give this place a big thumbs up, it was a really great hostel  - all the staff and owners were so friendly and welcoming, and there were lots of nice people staying there at the same time as us All waiting to be cooked
All waiting to be cooked
 . So it was really social, and many evenings we would sit around, chatting over some beers, empanadas or an asado. Every week the hostel organised an empanada evening, where they provided all the ingredients , and then taught you how to make them , a little more complicated than you would thing, but we soon got the hang of it, so as well as being a social activity and a way to meet people, it was a cheap meal!! Even better were the asados, Gato, the owner of the hostel was the asado master (as most Argentine men are) and he cooked up a wide range of various tasty parts of the cows, some of them that we had not heard of before or had not seen in the steak restaurants of Buenos Aires, which we actually prefered to bife de Lomo, but the our new faves are cuadro de cuatril, vacio (flank) and costilla.   Costilla, in particular tastes great, especially the fatty bit on the outside which has a great meaty flavour.  We did not do that much exploring of the city, as we had been back to a hospital to get Daniella's ankle looked at again, the doctor confirmed that there were no broken bones, but that she should rest in order for it to heal, but later on in our stay we did venture out as far as a local park, where we chilled under the trees whilst reading some books, before heading over to the nearby Museo des Belles Artes, this musuem is housed in beautiful building, there are some Okish paintings, but they were not that great. One other place that we did find was the local market, housed in a large building, all the stalls were inside, they had a wide range of stalls, everything from butchers, to greengrocers, to cheese and fish. Down one aisle, you could not move for all the dead animal carcasses hanging from hooks, this is the place to come if you are looking for meat! We stumbled upon this stall, that sold pan arabes, or arab bread, basically it is bread folded with meat inside, they give you a wedge of lemon to squeeze inside, tastes really good. After leaving the market one time, we were bit lost and this old guy for directions, our hostel was located on Avenue General Paz, but we had a few difficulties making ourselves understood, we had forgotten that the G is not pronunced  in Spanish, meaning the word sound like Eneral Paz, so the man was saying I dont understand until we worked out the correct way to say it, and then he was, oh of course Egnerral Paz, its 2 blocks that way! the pair of us looked a bit stupid but the Spanish pronounciation can be a little confusing.

Next stop: La Cumbre, which was our weekend getaway in the mountains to the west of Cordoba.
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